


Biding Time

by aretia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AU: Haxus lives, Gen, Halloween, Long-Distance Friendship, Pranks and Practical Jokes, Texting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 22:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16481231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aretia/pseuds/aretia
Summary: When Sendak and Haxus are apart, Haxus on the Castle of Lions and Sendak on the Galra fleet, they still find a way to share their pranking tradition together.





	Biding Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is my Galraween gift for thefusspot on tumblr! Beta read by Revasnaslan. Thank you to the mods for organizing the event!

Pidge wandered the halls of the Castle of Lions, in search of a TV that she could use to plug in her video game. The Alteans were an advanced civilization, so they _had_ to have some kind of screen-based entertainment. Compared to what it must have been like in its glory days as a hub for Altean culture, the castle was eerily empty now that it had fewer than a dozen occupants. Pidge wasn’t expecting to run into anyone else as she navigated the dark, unfamiliar halls deep in the belly of the castle.

Then, she spotted a glowing light floating ahead. She stepped closer, and saw the familiar triangular shape and green markings of her old robot friend, Rover. 

“Rover!” Pidge exclaimed. “I knew you weren’t gone! Have you been hiding down here this entire time?” She chased after the droid, but rather than approaching her, it zipped off in the other direction. “Hey, where are you going, you silly robot?” she called after it, her footsteps echoing down the halls.

When she turned the corner, Rover was gone. All she saw was the black chasm of an abandoned elevator shaft, the doors wedged open. “Okay, that’s a little creepy…” she muttered to herself. She crept closer to the elevator shaft, when suddenly the elevator car rose from the depths of the castle and popped up in front of her. She jumped, but relaxed once she saw Rover inside. “There you are!” she cried, and lunged to grab the robot, but when her hands passed through it, she realized that it was only a hologram. A trap. The doors of the elevator snapped shut, and Pidge’s screams echoed against its metallic walls as it rocketed her to the top of the castle.

Haxus stepped out into the hallway and chuckled at his own cleverness. He had used his own robot to project an image of itself, and hacked into the castle’s systems to manipulate the elevator. He wasn’t really trying to harm the paladin, just give her a good scare. He wanted to bide his time until the moment when revenge against her would be the sweetest. After all, he didn’t want to take it all for himself, when Sendak deserved his taste of vengeance as well.

Haxus summoned his decoy droid back to him, and downloaded the video from it to his communicator. He added the caption, “ _Looks like I’ve found a new hunting ground for my pranking skills_ ,” and sent it to Sendak, the only contact he still had within the Empire.

Sendak must have been off shift with nothing to do, because he texted back immediately. “ _That’s nothing, Haxus. Watch this_.”

He set his robotic eye implant to record what he was seeing. His upgraded prosthetic arm, with its claw suspended by a hovering ball of quintessence, took even the simplest pranks to a whole new level. Stationing himself behind a corner, Sendak propelled his arm to hover behind an unsuspecting guard. He tapped on his shoulder with his claw, then yanked his arm back towards him. The guard looked back and forth over his shoulders, even doing a full spin, but there was nothing there. Unnerved, his steps shook as he continued down the hall towards Sendak.

“Tevas,” he called out to another guard who was passing by, flagging him down and running up to him. They met just in front of the hallway where Sendak was hiding. “The weirdest thing just happened. I felt someone tap on my shoulder, but there was no one there!”

The other guard, Tevas, laughed. “You probably just had too much quintessence energy serum, Kayar.” 

“I’m serious! I think this ship is haunted!” Kayar insisted. “It’s almost the Night of the Fallen, when the spirits of dead Galra return to their posts. And the ones that have unfinished business on the living plane seek revenge,” he explained, lowering his voice to a whisper.

“Now I know you’re on too much quintessence, or too much inane horror programming,” Tevas said, rolling his eyes and giving Kayar a pat on the shoulder. Then, he withdrew his hand when he noticed that Kayar looked petrified. Kayar’s posture went stiff and his face turned an ashen shade of purple, as he stared at the space behind his buddy. “What are you looking at?”

“It’s right behind you,” Kayar replied, his voice trembling.

Tevas slowly turned around, and laid his eyes on Sendak’s claw hovering over the floor, positioned as if it was a standing figure and the glowing ball of quintessence was its head. The two guards shrieked and fled down the hall.

Chuckling to himself, Sendak tapped on his temple to end the recording, and sent it to Haxus. That trick would lose its novelty once his new arm was out of its testing phase, when he debuted it along with the announcement that he was back on the fleet. But until then he would make the most of it while he could.

He waited a few ticks for Haxus to watch the video before he got a reply. “ _That was cheap. You can do better than that_ ,” he said, and Sendak could hear it in Haxus’s deadpan voice.

“ _I’m off my game without you here_ ,” Sendak replied, a hint of a fond smile lifting the corner of his mouth.

“ _Oh please, you’re not about to get sappy, are you?_ ” came Haxus’s reply, almost as if he was reading his mind.

“ _I mean it. Prank wars with you aren’t the same when you’re not here to see me in action._ ” Sendak tried to water it down, make it sound like it was just about the prank wars, and not about actually missing Haxus, lest he scold him for being sentimental again. 

When Haxus’s reply came, Sendak was surprised that _Haxus_ was the one whose words were full of fire and sincerity. “ _Just you wait. I’ll be back soon. And once I find you again, neither Voltron nor the Galra Empire will know what hit them._ ”

His friend’s reassuring words made Sendak smile, tucking the communicator close to his chest. Haxus was right—once he and Sendak were reunited, they would be a force to be reckoned with, not just in prank wars against each other, but against the whole universe as well. They would capture Voltron and make them pay for their initial defeat, and they would bring about a new order for the Galra Empire as well. All Sendak had to do was bide his time and keep Haggar distracted while Haxus found his way out of the Castle of Lions and back to the Galra fleet, and then everything would change.


End file.
